Ubuntu 12.10 has been released, sporting the rather... Interesting tagline 'Avoid the pain of Windows 8'. Two main features are that websites can now be treated as actual applications, integrating them into Unity. The divide between local and online content when searching has also been softened, which, they claim, makes it easier to find what you're looking for. On the server side, it includes the Folsom release of OpenStack, "Cinder, for block storage and Quantum, a virtual networking API. Ubuntu's Metal-as-a-Service bare-metal provisioning tool has been updated and now supports Calxeda hyperscale hardware based on ARM".

I myself am a long time Linux user. Never did I do any homework before buying new hardware. Probably I was lucky but always all my hardware worked, even wireless printers and dual video cards setups. That is not to say I did not encounter problems: I did, several. Still, as a rule I found it easier and more pleasant to deal with those Linux problems than I do dealing with Windows' problems. Perhaps Linux lacks a company or a group of people to do for a single distribution what I do for my personal use. You see, linux works, period. In too many cases better than Windows. Hardware support in Linux is close to a non-issue to me; at least no more than Windows. I repeat: one company or group should focus effort in doing it easier for users and the tech people alike to solve driver/software problems; as it stands now, it is perceivably (but in reality, for those who know their way around both OSs, it is the same) more diffilcult to solve such problems in Linux than in Windows.